ove for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln
would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people
started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at
themselves.

When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as
if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on,
walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver
Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do
claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark
recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers
and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and
grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages
were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were
not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all
have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the
capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little
girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was
prettiest, about themselves.

Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do
anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's
emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe
about itself.

With Capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the really
mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative
use of criticism,--incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of
making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same
undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a
national dramatization,--a rather loud and theatrical acting out before
an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as
institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear,
superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous
strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty
years, had made us suspect they were!

For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that
bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral
garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in
what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this
nation--called The Public. And we have carted it all away and pai